146 SECTIONAL ADDRESSES. 
anthropology has been subjected to criticism of different kinds from these 
two quarters. 
Throughout almost the whole of the nineteenth century there was little 
distinction between ethnology and social anthropology. Tylor, for 
example, combined the two studies. It is true that some writers followed 
by preference one study to the exclusion of the other. Thus, Sir James 
Frazer has rarely concerned himself with ethnological problems. It is 
also true that the two methods occasionally came into conflict over 
particular problems, but this conflict did not become one between the 
two methods and the two points of view. 
Towards the end of the last century and in the earlier part of this 
century there developed, in America, in Germany and in England, schools 
of ethnologists which, while disagreeing amongst themselves on particular 
questions of historical reconstruction, and even on the methods of 
ethnological analysis, yet all joined in attacking the methods of social 
anthropology from the point of view of historical method. These 
criticisms of what the ethnologists call ‘ evolutionary anthropology’ are 
familiar to all of you. 
The shift over from social anthropology to ethnology is illustrated in 
the development of the ideas of the late Dr. Rivers. I think I can speak 
with some knowledge of Rivers, for I was for three years his pupil in 
psychology, and was his first pupil in social anthropology in the year 1904. 
Rivers was from first to last primarily a psychologist, and was an inspiring 
teacher in psychology. He had no training in ethnology or in archeology, 
and only gradually made a partial acquaintance with those subjects. In 
his first period of interest in anthropology, from the time of the Cambridge 
Expedition to Torres Straits to the year 1909, his conception of the aims 
and methods to be followed in the study of non-European peoples was 
that of what I have been describing as social anthropology. Even if he 
could not regard Morgan’s theories, for example, as being satisfactory, he 
yet assumed that the making of theories of that type was the task of the 
anthropologist, and I believe that even up to the end of his life he still 
accepted in general outline the animistic theory of Tylor and Frazer. 
Ultimately, during his work in Melanesia, his growing dissatisfaction with 
that method came to a head, and in 1911, in his presidential address to 
this section, he declared his allegiance to the ethnological method. In 
other words, from one type of historical study he transferred his attention 
to another. In the years 1913 and 1914 I had much discussion with 
Dr. Rivers on the subject of anthropological method by correspondence 
and in personal interviews, partly because at that time he did me the ~ 
kindness to read and criticise, in manuscript and in proof, a book that 1 _ 
was writing. His view at the time our discussions ceased was that, while 
he was fully prepared to grant the validity and the necessity of the method — 
of comparative sociology, he regarded the method of ethnology as equally 
valid and necessary and at the same time independent, and that he 
preferred to devote his own attention to the latter rather than the former. 
At the very end of his life there were indications that his attitude was — 
changing once more, that he was growing somewhat dissatisfied with the — 
ethnological method which he so stoutly defended in 1911, and that he 
